Reputation management used to be about scanning newspapers and magazines. However, the world is changing fast. It’s quite likely that your customers spend more time online than they do watching TV. Surfing the Internet, whether for business or pleasure is now the most common pastime in the Western world. People socialise online, shop online, do business online; everything. So its important that you track what people are saying about you online.
You might think that your business maybe too small and no one talks about you, or maybe you think that you already monitor your website, blog and Twitter and that’s good enough. Well that’s where you are wrong! People are constantly talking online – sometimes they’re talking to you, othertimes about you. You need to make sure you’re monitoring the whole of the world wide web for your keywords (namely your business name). Only then can you respond to people when they mention you. If someone makes a negative comment about your company in a forum shouldhave processes in place that would alerted you to it. Then you’ll be able to instantly respond to it, fix the situation and show them how good your customer service actually is.
So where are people making comments about your business?
- Blogs
- Social Networks (such as Facebook, Mebo and MySpace)
- Social Media Sites (such as the reviews within Amazon)
- Wikipedia
- Blog Comments
- Message Boards
- Forums
- Consumer Websites
- Article sites
- Video Sites (such as YouTube, Moveo)
- Photo Sites (such as Flickr, Google Picasa)
Monitoring your online brand reputation will allow you to gain further understanding of what people think of you and your products and services. You can view trends and find out what is and what isn’t popular, and be made aware of any potential issues.
Our next post on Monday will outline what tools you can use to monitor your online reputation – make sure you don’t miss it. You can be alerted to all our post updates by entering your email in the box to the right.